Moon Over Soho (38 page)

I checked. “Just bruises and twisted my knee.”

Nightingale pointed at the remains of the chimney stack. “Did you do that?”

“That was me. Didn’t work, though. He had sort of a force field thing going on.”

The police sirens reached the street outside and we heard the
thump-thump
of police officers slamming their car doors.

Nightingale turned to Caffrey. “Frank, you and your lads better pull back to the van,” he said. “We’ll join you once we’ve sorted out the locals.”

The paras loped off across the roofs toward the fire escape down to Duck Lane. I hoped that Simone and her sisters had been sensible enough to keep moving after they’d escaped.

“A full shield,” said Nightingale, returning to our earlier discussion.

“And he caught my fireball,” I said. “Did I mention that? Just plucked it out of the air.”

“This man has been trained by a master,” said Nightingale. “Have you any idea how many years it takes to practice at that level? The dedication and self-discipline he would have needed? You’ve just met one of the most dangerous men in the world.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “And you’re still alive. Now, that’s impressive.”

For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.

From deep inside the house we heard the distinctive rumble of police feet running up the stairs.

I pointed at the late Tiger-Boy. “What do I tell them about him?”

“You don’t know who shot him,” said Nightingale. “You thought it might have been a police sniper. Isn’t that right?”

I nodded. It’s always better to tell a half-truth than a half-lie. This is London, guv, we don’t have no paramilitary-style death squads here. “We need to talk about this,” I said. “Before we do anything else.”

“Yes,” said Nightingale grimly. “I believe we do.”

Nightingale strode over to the door and called down that he was in charge and that the roof was a crime scene and that unless they were members of Murder Team they had better stay clear if they knew what was good for them.

“I am the bloody Murder Team,” shouted Stephanopoulis from below. Four flights of stairs hadn’t done much to improve her mood and she emerged onto the roof like an overdue tax demand. She glared at Nightingale and then, stepping carefully so as to preserve the scene, walked over to where Tiger-Boy lay sprawled on the flagstones. Blood had pooled under his head, slick and black in the reflected streetlight.

Stephanopoulis looked over at the body and then back at me. “Not another one,” she said wearily. “You want to watch it, son. At the rate you’re going the Department of Professional Standards is going to have your number on speed dial.” She narrowed her eyes at Nightingale. “What’s your opinion, sir?” she asked.

Nightingale indicated the body with his cane. “Clearly shot by person or persons unknown, Sergeant.” He shifted the cane to point across the road. “I’d say the shots were fired from the roof or top floor of that building over there.”

Stephanopoulis didn’t even bother to look. “Any idea who he is?”

“None whatsoever, I’m afraid,” said Nightingale. “But I doubt he has any friends or family.”

Which meant no one to raise a fuss at the inquest, no one to claim the body. Which meant, if I was to guess, that a fairly large percentage of him would end up in Dr. Walid’s freezer.

It took me an hour to get off that roof and once again I had to surrender my top layer of clothes to forensics, who now
had, I calculated, more pairs of my shoes than I did. They swabbed Nightingale’s and my hands for gunshot residue and we both went downstairs to separate cars to give preliminary statements. It was three in the morning by the time Stephanopoulis released us on our own recognizance and by that time even Soho was feeling jaded.

Caffrey and the paratroopers had holed up in a side road off Broadwick Street. I’d been right about the Transit van, which was white and fitted with patently false license plates. “We don’t like paying the congestion charge,” Caffrey said when I asked about them. “The van’s kosher though—belongs to the brother-in-law.” Among them, the paras managed to furnish me with a pair of black jeans, a charcoal-gray hoodie with
AGRO
stenciled across the front, and a pair of generic sneakers so I could get out of the noddy suit forensics had given me. I caught a whiff of gun oil lingering in the fabric of the jeans and I had a strong suspicion that they and the sweatshirt had been in the gun bags to muffle the clank of the rifles.

Nightingale waited patiently in the drizzle while I got dressed. Before I could join him, Caffrey stopped me with his hand on my arm. “We don’t want to be here when it gets light,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “This won’t take long.”

Nightingale looked gaunt and colorless under the sodium lights; there were smudges under his eyes, and while he tried to hide it I saw the occasional shiver. He kept his expression bland.

“Would you like to go first, sir?” I said.

He nodded, but gave me a long cool look before finally he sighed. “When I took you on as my apprentice, I thought I could protect you from having to make certain ‘choices.’ I see now that I was wrong, and for that I apologize. That said, what the hell did you think you were trying to achieve?”

“I was trying to do my duty as a sworn constable under the Human Rights Act,” I said. “To wit, the right to life under article two, which mandates that any use of force must be absolutely necessary and that any poor bastard we kill had better have it coming good and proper.”

“Assuming that you expand the definition of human being to vampires and chimeras,” said Nightingale.

“Then let’s get a judgment from the courts or better still have Parliament clarify the law,” I said. “But it’s not our place to make that decision, sir—is it? We’re just coppers.”

“If they were ugly, Peter, would you care half so much?” asked Nightingale. “There are some hideous things out there that can talk and reason and I wonder if you would be quite so quick to rush to their defense.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But that just makes me shallow, it doesn’t make me wrong.”

“I estimate that among them Simone and her sisters have killed or mutilated almost two hundred and twenty people since 1941,” said Nightingale. “These people also had their human rights.”

“I’m saying that we just can’t pretend that the law doesn’t exist,” I said.

“Very well,” said Nightingale. “Let’s assume that we arrest them and, God knows how, try to convict them for …”

“Manslaughter by gross negligence, sir,” I said. “I think it would have been reasonable to expect them, after twenty years or so, to notice that they weren’t getting any older and that their boyfriends were regularly kicking the bucket.”

“They’re going to say they didn’t remember,” said Nightingale.

“I believe them, sir,” I said. “Which means they are suffering from a mental disorder as defined by the Mental Health Act of 1983 and since they are an obvious threat to members of the public we can detain them under section one thirty-five of the aforesaid act and remove them to a place of safety for care and evaluation.”

“And when they get hungry?” he asked. “Do you think starving them to death is more humane?”

“We don’t know they’d die,” I said. “Perhaps their metabolism will revert and if all else fails we can feed them. They were taking less than a victim a year—they can’t need that much.”

“And you want to spend the rest of your life doing that?”

“You can’t just off someone because it’s more convenient,”
I said. “What did all your friends die for, all those names on the wall, what did they die for if not for that?”

He recoiled. “I don’t know what they died for,” he said. “I didn’t know then and I still don’t know now.”

“Well, I do,” I said. “Even if you’ve forgotten. They died because they thought there was a better way of doing things, even if they were still arguing about what it was.”

I saw it in his eyes—he wanted so badly to believe.

“It’s nothing that we can’t handle,” I said. “Are you really telling me that among you, me, and Dr. Walid we can’t work something out? Maybe I can find a way to feed them pocket calculators and mobile phones. Maybe if we can fix them, we can fix the others. Wouldn’t that be better than just dropping a phosphorous grenade on them—really? Besides, Molly might like the company.”

“You want to keep them in the Folly?”

“Initially,” I said. “Until we can figure out how far they can be trusted. Once we’ve got them stabilized we could set up a halfway house. Preferably somewhere where there’s no jazz scene.”

“This is mad,” said Nightingale.

“And they could take Toby for walks,” I said.

“Oh, well in that case, why don’t we throw our doors open to all and sundry,” he said, and I knew I had him.

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “Wouldn’t a pilot project be more sensible in the first instance?”

“We still don’t know where they’ve gone,” he said.

“I know where they’ve gone.”

W
E MOVED
the Transit van to Great Windmill Street, parked next to the McDonald’s, and left the private army inside while we went to check out the staff entrance to the Café de Paris. “Why don’t we send Frank home?” I asked.

“We may need him if that bastard black magician turns up again,” he said.

“Are you saying you can’t take him?”

“Fortune favors the prepared,” said Nightingale.

The entrance door was ajar, which not only meant that Simone was probably inside but also that we had reasonable
cause to enter the premises without a search warrant under section 17 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984). There was broken glass in the kitchen. They’d evidently helped themselves to a midnight snack. The door to the champagne cooler had been left open and the hum of its compressor followed us back out into the service corridor.

“They must be in the ballroom,” I said and Nightingale nodded. “Give me five minutes to calm them down and then come in.”

He nodded again. “Be careful,” he said.

The service corridor doglegged and ended in a door that led me out onto the landing that overlooked the length of the ballroom. Unlike the last time I’d visited, the tables had been laid out in an oval around the dance floor and covered in crisp white cloths.

I knew as soon as I saw them sitting at their old table, surprisingly small and situated at half past one in relation to the band. There was a trio of bottles arrayed on it—one each. I had a pit in my chest and a ringing in my ears but I made myself go down the stairs to check. They were still in the clothes they’d been wearing when they’d left, but they’d done their best with lipstick and mascara to make themselves look presentable. Later tests by Dr. Walid indicated that they’d done the deed with alcohol and phenobarbital, the formulation matching the empty tablet strips found neatly stowed in Peggy’s handbag.

Suicides are rarely pretty, but the sisters had managed to avoid slumping or lolling or dribbling vomit down their fronts. I think they would have been satisfied with the tableau they created—three bright young things caught just on the cusp of their futures. I was so angry I had to force myself to stop and breathe deeply before I could carry on.

Simone’s eyes were open. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and I had to brush it back so I could put my fingers on her throat. Her skin was only slightly cool, and the time of death was later determined to have been approximately twenty minutes before I’d arrived—about when I was discussing comparative ethics with Nightingale. This close to
her, I could smell honeysuckle and brick dust. But the music, which I only now realized had been there all the time, had gone.

I didn’t kiss her or anything like that.

I didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.

T
HIS IS
how you get out of bed the next day. You push off your duvet, rotate your body, put your feet on the floor, and stand up. Then it’s have a wee, have a bath, get dressed, go downstairs, eat breakfast, talk to your boss, practice your
forma
, eat lunch, smack the shit out of the punching bag in the gym, shower, get dressed, get in the Ford Asbo, and head into town to make sure that your face is being seen. You do this because it is your job, because it’s necessary, and because, if you’re honest, you love it. Repeat this process until the bad dreams stop or you just get used to them—whichever comes first.

There was a coroner’s report on their deaths, which ruled that they had committed suicide and so the sisters won a brief moment of fame as a suicide pact. But nobody in the media was so interested that they did any investigation beyond that. Nightingale handled the follow-up inquiry with the aid of a couple of detective constables on loan from Westminster CID, one of them my favorite Somali ninja girl. They couldn’t be told that the victims were immortal jazz vampires, so it was down to me to take the story back to the war.

Simone Fitzwilliam, Cherie Mensier, and Margaret “Peggy” Brown were reported missing by their parents in 1941, and although the police carried out an investigation it had been cursory at best—and why not? The city was in flames at the time. I considered tracking down their closest
relatives but what would I tell them? That some half-forgotten great-aunt had died in the famous bombing at the Café de Paris but managed to have a pretty enjoyable afterlife all the same? Right up until I came along and got her killed. Again.